Microsoft Could Still Win the Future of Health Wearables

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Microsoft Could Still Win the Future of Health Wearables

Microsoft

Can Microsoft compete with Google, Apple, and so many others in the ever-expanding world of wearable health gizmos? J.P. Gownder thinks so—if the company can make good on its promise to closely analyze all the data streaming from its new Microsoft Band wearable.

Microsoft launched Band on Thursday, alongside a service called Microsoft Health, a new wellness tracking platform that dovetails with the wearable and competes directly with the likes of Google Fit and Apple Health. Basically, Health does the same thing as its rivals. It acts as a hub for health data, whether it's coming from Microsoft Band or other fitness trackers and apps such as Jawbone UP, MyFitnessPal, MapMyFitness, and RunKeeper.

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Both Microsoft Band and the Health app are available on the major mobile OSes—iOS, Android, and Windows Phone—signaling Redmond’s commitment to a cross-platform ethos. That’s laudable, but the way Microsoft might actually succeed at wearables, at least according to Gownder, a principal analyst with tech research outfit Forrester Research, is if it ends up providing richer insights than its competitors.

The information coming from fitness trackers today, he says, is still oversimplified. "They only begin the journey in terms of telling people what to do with the data," he says. "Like, if you haven’t taken your 10,000 steps yet, then 'Oh, you better take some more steps.'"

Microsoft Health, on the other hand, aims to track a more complete picture of a user's health and fitness activities and then deeply analyze it. The company describes it as a cloud service that unites disparate bits of data from various devices and sources in one secure place. Health can track a user's steps, calories, heart rate, UV index, and more, and afterwards, Microsoft’s "Intelligence Engine: crunches the data and spits out real-world insights across nutrition, work, fitness, and rest—which could be anything from how long you need to recover before your next workout to how much of your sleep from the previous night was restful.

"If they’re successful at that," says Gownder, "they’re going to be giving people less data and more advice that actually makes a difference." Indeed, given its good standing in cloud computing and data processing, Microsoft just might be in a unique enough position to pull this off.

Gownder says Microsoft’s focus on insights could also beat the abandonment problem that has plagued fitness trackers in the past. According to one recent survey, about a third of users who buy fitness trackers end up wearing them infrequently or stop using them altogether after a year or so. But, Gownder points out, maybe it's simply that the advice coming from other trackers isn’t useful enough to incentivize people to keep wearing them.

The system faces challenges, of course. "Microsoft Band is clearly the most comprehensive device in a single device," says Gownder, noting the presence of features that are less common in other bands, like GPS tracking and the ability to measure sun exposure. This could be valuable, he says, if Microsoft Health can elegantly integrate into the workforce or the healthcare system in the future—if, say, it eventually adopted the ability to tell a truck driver to pull over and get some rest before attempting to continue driving, or if the system’s data became HIPAA-compliant and reliable enough to use by doctors.

But the flip side is feature-itis, and as is true in so many other cases, Microsoft must perform a balancing act. "You don’t want to be proactively spammed by your wrist," Gownder says. "But at the same time, you don’t want to have to work too hard to get insights."